Abstract
Extract
Pneumonia is likely to have been a problem in sheep in New Zealand since they were first farmed intensively. The earliest record of the disease is provided by John Gilruth (1900), a pioneer of veterinary science in this country, who noted the occurrence of suppurative pneumonia and pleurisy in sheep slaughtered at an abattoir at the beginning of the last century. It was more than 50 years before significant new information was added to Gilruth's early observations, when Salisbury (1957) provided a detailed description of an outbreak of pneumonia in sheep in Southland. The disease he observed closely resembled an acute form of pneumonia recorded in Great Britain 20 years earlier (Montgomerie et al, 1938) which had been named enzootic pneumonia. Since then, confusion over the nomenclature of the ovine pneumonias has been an ongoing problem. The variety of terms used in New Zealand and overseas has been defined and tabulated (Alley 1991; Alley et al 1999).